Many smaller businesses may mistakenly think they cannot afford a digital data storage and recovery options. However, data recovery does not get any cheaper when Raid data recovery or laptop hard drive recovery must be done by a professional. Why switch from tape to phones, iPods, images, stills and other devices? One advantage of removable data storage is that it can be easily transported almost anywhere. Multimedia cards, flash drives, and memory cards are easy options for smaller businesses that need cheap data storage.
These removable digital media storage options are easy options and cheaper than some Raid systems, they also may be easier to recover data than hiring a professional to perform hard disk data recovery or Raid data recovery. The dangers with removable digital options are that they also may be harder to secure and protect sensitive data.
Protecting removable external devices from Hackers
Smaller businesses may not be able to afford a Raid system and may not need Raid data recovery from a trained professional. A businessman may opt for less costly measures of data storage and backup, such as using a USB flash drive. What is the best way to protect removable digital storage devices, if they are lost or stolen? One way small business owners can ensure their employees are not allowing sensitive data into the hands of hackers is to have flash drives that are password protected.
Flash drives are solid state storage devices that will not last forever. A USB flash drive will fail after so many times of adding or deleting data. However, employees should not give up on their flash drive if it does fail and they cannot retrieve sensitive, company data. A trained professional may be able to gain access data off a memory stick, but also access data from a failing laptop that needs laptop data recovery.
Automated backup may be a good solution for some small business Owners
For some small business owners, an automatic backup of necessary data may be a good way to protect sensitive data and ensure that backups are up-to-date. Did you know 60 percent of businesses admitted in 2013 that they did not regularly backup their data? Why is it important for small business owners to back-up data regularly? Small business owners do not have to worry about forgetting to back up data.
Depending on the type of backup, small business owners may be able to choose between an incremental or differential backup.It also may save Businessman from needing Raid data recovery in the area.
Have you ever considered using a portable data storage device to keep data safe? Some experts suggest that other methods of data storage should be used as well because USB flash drives and laptop hard drives can be easily hacked. It may cause small owners to need laptop hard drive recovery options. It may be best to consult an expert in hard disk data recovery if small owners do find evidence of hacking or a virus on their machines.
Yes, it’s all going to the cloud, which is better than “to the dogs.” And yes, you have to make sure your cloud environment is secure.
You need to confront some hard realities about cloud security because the cyber landscape continues to be unforgiving. It doesn’t matter whether you’re protecting traditional computer systems, your mobile platform or the cloud itself. Simply put, organized cyber crime and cyber espionage continue to grow in sophistication. Any new hackable platform is red meat for them. Opening massive breaches that harvest critical data is their day and night job. News headlines make that clear that the aggregate total of global cyber crime damage now rivals that of many nations’ annual gross domestic product (GDP).
First reality: Organizations spend considerable time and money securing their on-premises infrastructure. That’s good. The problem is maintaining that same high level of security when outsourcing to the cloud. Security delivery requires a cloud provider’s undivided attention. Yes, there are built-in security tools, but you will not get the key to any strong security posture—24/7/365 threat monitoring, analysis and response—or “managed security service.” These are humans watching out for you. You must know what’s happening on the cloud in real time and be able to respond very quickly. You need people to manage this, even if you have automated capabilities as part of your cloud security. The “cloud” doesn’t do it on its own.
(Related: An interview with Brendan Hannigan, IBM GM Security Systems Division)
Second reality: Repeat after me: “My cloud will be breached.” Take a deep breath. Say it one more time.
Remember, just because you’ve been breached doesn’t mean an attacker knows where to go once they get in your system. If you identify the attack quickly you can prevent him or her from getting to your critical data.
So, review your incident response plan for cloud security. What, you don’t have one? Okay, review the plan you have for your premises infrastructure.
If you still have a blank look, gather your team and start putting a response plan together—fast. How you handle it is crucial, particularly the speed of your response. Sophisticated attacks often show no upfront “symptoms” but can quietly devastate your business over time. The longer it takes to resolve an attack, the more costly it becomes.
Prevention starts with an incident-response plan and mock exercises to test the plan. Get an experienced provider to try and hack your cloud. Find out your vulnerabilities. Most important, make sure you have a team ready to move quickly and decisively if you suspect your cloud has been attacked.
Third reality: Last but maybe most importantly, get smart about “security intelligence.” Your cloud systems, along with your other IT platforms, generate billions of security events each day from firewalls, emails, servers and the like. It’s simply not possible to manually sift through this data and find evidence of suspicious behavior. Beyond the costs involved, it’s confined to figuring out “what happened” rather than “what will occur.”
When applied to security data, big-data analytics tools can be transformative—the tip of the spear in security intelligence and response. Analytics can provide automated, real-time intelligence and situational awareness about your infrastructure’s state of security to help disrupt the attack chain.
Say that two similar security incidents take place, one in Brazil, the other in Pittsburgh. They may be related. But without the intelligence needed to link them, an important pattern—one that could indicate a potential incident—may go unnoticed.
You need this capability, and providers like IBM are stepping up to make it the ultimate reality.
Stay safe.
Watch the video below and see how Ignite Social Media used the tools of Office 365 which helped productivity through the power of cloud communication. Connecting to your clients and your employees has never been easier. If you’re interested in learning more about what Office 365 can do for you than please check out more info on our free lunch and learn event we having going on at Seasons 52 on March 18th. Find out more infor here: http://events.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=hxcf8qcab&oeidk=a07ead19wefc90f94c5
[vc_video link=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt-0pdcyn8U’]
Today it’s easy to forget what that world was like:
A single server handled a single workload. Outside mainframe and certain proprietary systems, the way organizations utilized servers was very much a 1:1 relationship, and the average X86 server was running at 15% CPU utilization. Nearly every new project required standing up a new server. Servers often had to be purchased, Ops had to perform a physical implementation, the network team had to provide connectivity, the server team had to load and patch the O/S, DBA’s had set up the databases and the application owners had to load and patch the applications. If the application outgrew the server, or migration to a new platform was desired, the above process had to be repeated…again and again. Ten years later, most IT Organizations have virtualized 70-90% of their server environments, with the following benefits. Consider the functionality we now take for granted:
A single physical server can handle any number of virtual workloads and CPU utilization can reach 80% or greater. Provisioning of a new server can be automated and/or self-service can be provided to end-users. A new server can be brought online almost instantaneously. Servers can be easily moved from platform to platform, location to location, or location to cloud Progress followed a similar arc on the network side, where nimble and efficient virtual networking has replaced the prior generation of (literally) hard-wired and brittle infrastructure.
Having transformed the way we consume compute and network bandwidth, we remain limited by enterprise data bound to physical infrastructure. As we look to develop applications faster, create new SLA’s and utilize cloud services, this gap between applications and data grows larger.
Consider the parallels:
A copy of data is typically required for each use case. It is common for organizations to have separate copies for backup, snapshot, remote replication, dev, test, QA, analytics, etc. 20+ copies of data is not unusual in large organizations. Nearly every new project requires provisioning another copy of data. Storage often has to be purchased, Ops has to perform a physical implementation, the storage team has to provision capacity and make the copies, the network team has to provide connectivity, the server team has to build the file system and DBA’s have to scrub/mask the data. The tools for making copies today are storage vendor specific. Data cannot be copied easily from platform to platform. Moving data between disparate platforms or to the cloud is largely a manual, labor-intensive process. Copy Data Virtualization addresses the fact that these problems can’t be solved at the storage layer. They must be solved at the application layer, with a platform that can communicate with any storage system. Actifio Copy Data Virtualization provides such a platform… an application-centric and infrastructure-agnostic solution that changes everything, in ways parallel to its peers in compute and networking:
A single physical copy of source data can be used to create an unlimited (subject to i/o requirements) number of virtual read/write capable copies. Provisioning new copies of data can be fully automated via customer-defined workflows, and end users can make instantaneous self-service copies. Data can be moved from platform to platform, location to location or location to cloud. Data can be accessed anywhere. Much has been said about the revolutionary nature of Actifio, and it’s true that we’re a highly disruptive technology. Where the established storage vendors birthed a generation of data management that was infrastructure-centric and application-agnostic, Actifio is just the opposite… an approach that drives everything down from the application SLA, and treats the storage hardware as a commodity.
In another sense, though, we’re just the logical next step in a shift toward virtualized technology that’s been underway for a while now. Some people seem to understand us more clearly in that light, and that’s just fine by us.
As mobile devices continue to infiltrate organizations, the demand for secure solutions becomes critical. By 2017, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and enterprise mobility market is expected to reach upwards of $181 billion. The introduction of these new devices influence the way businesses collaborate, communicate and innovate. In order to maintain their status as a market leader, organizations must stay ahead of the quickly evolving technology trends and develop ways to securely integrate them into day-to-day operations. Here’s a breakdown of a few of the mobile trends that are quickly becoming hot topics for 2014:
Predicting the potential risks of wearable technology
According to research firm Juniper, 2014 is the year that wearable technology goes mainstream. Last year, Google launched its highly anticipated glasses and Samsung rolled out a smart watch, while other big tech players including Apple gear up to introduce a whole new breed of wearable tech. On the horizon: smart contact lenses, LED sweaters that can sense your mood and even fingernails rigged with individual radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, allowing the wearer to perform a variety of tasks normally completed with a card.
A recent Fortinet survey, which was conducted across 20 countries and surveyed 3,200 21-32 year old employees, found that 16 percent of respondents agreed that they would use wearable technologies in work or for work purposes as soon as they become available and 33 percent as soon as their price is affordable. Juniper cautions that privacy will be an ongoing issue with wearable tech, as cameras go everywhere – including the workplace. IT teams will face similar challenges and risks as with mobile devices, the most important of which is protecting corporate data.
Stepping up security with a multi-layered approach
As more business processes are extended to mobile, many organizations are finding uses for both mobile device management (MDM) and containerization, either for different deployments or on the same device. Organizations with highly sensitive proprietary content or in strictly regulated industries may prefer the added security that MDM and containerization on the same device provides. A corporate container deployed on a managed device provides an extra barrier to access corporate content. Users are required to enter both a device-level passcode and a container-level passcode, and administrators have both device-level controls and application-level controls that enable app-to-app collaboration with other managed and secure applications within the container.
This approach also creates a sense of segmentation between work and play for end users, bringing a dual-persona feel to managed devices by isolating corporate content inside a secure container. MDM and containerization are often thought of as mutually exclusive security solutions, but today’s most innovative organizations are taking a layered approach to security by using the two in conjunction.
Adopting app scanning to protect organizations and end-users
As employees increasingly demand more apps for business, IT administrators must block malicious applications and certify that internal and third-party applications meet their organization’s security standards. Administrators need to protect organizations from publicly available malicious applications, risks that come with internal and third-party apps, and address concerns around apps accessing personal data on employee-owned devices. In order to address these concerns, organizations must integrate app scanning into their business platform.
With app scanning, IT administrators can identify common app risks, such as access to privacy settings, insecure network connections, malicious code and more. By scanning the applications, administrators can identify potential privacy, behavior, and design and programming risks. This information gives IT administrators the ability to assess whether an application is safe for business use or blacklist the application if it does not meet the minimum security standard, empowering them to take action and eliminate current and future risks.
When it comes to adopting any new technology, the less time organizations spend worrying about security, the more they can focus on driving core business strategies. Therefore, understanding technology trends and predicting their impact is vital to any organization’s mobility strategy.
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